Category: Op-Ed

[Note regarding the post below: I mentioned a letter I had received from former Oak Ridge Community Band director Dale Pendley, which I termed a reprimand. At the time I wrote the post below, I could not remember exactly what he said because I couldn’t find the letter. But now I have found it again. Although he does state that “your opinion expressed to the entire band was inappropriate, hurtful to a fellow band member and was not the more carefully structured type of comment as you have expressed in the past”, the rest of the letter, almost a page long, is conciliatory. Of course, my comment was not my opinion at all, but something I was passing on from an audience member, as others who heard me make the comment acknowledged, and I did not, as Dale implied in the letter, name the fellow band member. Dale wrote the letter weeks after the comment, so he may not have remembered clearly what I said. I think Dale meant the letter as a gentle nudge not to give any criticisms whatsoever of anybody else in the band, named or not, in the presence of the whole band — in the interest of maintaining band unity. I just shake my head in dismay at that attitude, but at the time, as I note below, I did make a successful effort to mend fences with the person who felt insulted by my comment. That’s what grownups do.]

[Although this is a very long post, I hope that people will read it. I think that this incident raises issues of how people are treated and act in small private groups that people can belong to for many years and where long-term membership over years can be cherished.]

This is an account of how I was kicked out of the Oak Ridge Community Band (ORCB), in which I had played for almost 30 years. I believe that this action was unjust, but since this is a private organization there is no appeal; the band board does what it wants. Because of the tight attachment I have had to the band for so long, the consequences for me of being kicked out have been very hard to bear. I am putting up this post to discuss what happened and the issues that this raises for people in community bands and other such amateur associations.

It all started when a concert was organized to benefit Ukrainian refugees taking refuge in Poland and the ORCB agreed to participate in it. It was not our concert, i.e., we did not organize it and we were not the sole performers in it. But we treated this performance as a serious commitment because of the purpose of it.

The Unity Concert, as it was called, took place on May 7, 2022 in the outdoor pavilion at Bissell Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The performers were on the stage under the large canopy, but the audience was out in the open sitting on a grassy slope. After the National Anthem, ORCB’s program began with Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland. This required brass and percussion only, so we woodwinds just sat it out. I sat at the end of my semicircular row of flutes, near the edge of the stage. At some point during the piece I could hear the noise of children and since it persisted, I turned in my seat to see where they were. There were two of them, one about middle school age and one about elementary school age, and they were in the strip of grass between the stage and the rest of the audience; there was no one else near them. They seemed to be wrestling with one another while calling out to each other. The sustained noise made it difficult for me to listen to Fanfare. Besides that, our sound had to travel over the heads of the children to get to one side of the audience, so I thought that at least some of the audience was likely bothered by the noise.

I considered stepping to the edge of the stage at the end of Fanfare and speaking to the children, but I thought that maybe they would pipe down during the next piece, Songs of Grace and Songs of Glory by John Phillip Sousa. This is a compilation of religious music that Sousa’s band played at all their concerts and it includes an excerpt from the Verdi Requiem, Rock of Ages and other hymns, and the Sevenfold Amen. It is a solemn and uplifting piece, the sort of thing you would hear in church. Most of the flutes sit out 40 or so measures of rests at the beginning and I could hear the kids going on and on during all of them; it was very distracting and because of that I had trouble keeping count of the measures. After we flutes came in, I could hear the kids as I played, another distraction.

When we reached the Sevenfold Amen at the end – another no-flute passage — I had had enough. I thought ahead of time what I would say to the children. When the piece ended, I put my flute on the stand and walked the few steps to the edge of the stage and toward them. I got the attention of the kids right away and said, “Please stop chattering while we are playing. It’s distracting.” I couldn’t see the kids very clearly because I had my single-vision band glasses on, but I could see that the older one, the boy, made an “Oh” motion with his mouth, as though he had not realized that the two of them were so loud and people were noticing. Just then I heard the announcer announcing the moment of silence for the Ukrainian dead and I zipped back to my seat.

There was no more noise from those two children after I spoke to them. Problem solved, I thought, plus I arguably had saved the moment of silence. I later estimated that the kids had been going on for at least ten minutes: probably at least two minutes during Fanfare, the nominal 8 minutes and 40 seconds of Songs of Grace, and perhaps 45 seconds between the end of Songs of Grace and my speaking to them.

We finished the concert and I was packing up my things to go when a woman whom I did not recognize suddenly descended on me and started shouting at me: “How dare you speak to my children! Don’t ever speak to my children again! Stay away from my children!” I muttered, “Get over yourself”, but I didn’t think she heard me because she was yelling as I said it. She did not ask me any questions or attempt to engage me in conversation, but continued to berate me: “I am a professional musician! My children are adopted and they have been through enough!” She said other things, but I all I can remember is her saying she would not attend our concerts again. I just sat there looking at the floor of the pavilion, waiting for her to run down. People in the band and in the audience were looking at us. As she finally started to move off, still yelling, I muttered, “It takes a village, lady”. I thought she might have heard that. Then it was over and I returned to packing up my things.

But about a minute later, a man I did recognize rushed at me from the back of the stage. He started shouting at me from about the middle of the stage. I can’t remember anything he said, but someone else in the band told me later that among other things he shouted, “Keep your hands off my babies!” Our director, Shaun Salem, stepped forward and, taking his shoulder, turned him toward the back of the stage and walked him back, speaking to him as he went – calming the man down, as I thought.

I was shaken at the double attack, but I finished getting my things together. As I went off the stage, nobody spoke to me. I know that when one person shouts at another in public, bystanders often blame the shoutee and not the shouter, as if they assumed that the shoutee must have done something for which to be shouted at. So I was afraid that everyone would think that I had done something to merit being railed at by the two. I was walking behind a new fellow flute player and her husband when I heard him ask her if she knew what all the shouting was about. She replied that she didn’t. I said to them, “I will tell you what it was about if you’re interested.” She coldly replied, “No”. So again I thought that people might be blaming me for the disturbance.

I was very shaken up and I had trouble sleeping that night and the next. The incident was all I could think about; I went over and over the sequence of events, wondering how such a firestorm of obloquy could have rained down on me. The man who shouted at me was Don Lordo, our accomplished timpanist. I realized that the woman was his wife, Beth Lordo, a pianist, and the children were theirs. I also realized that I had talked with the older child, the boy, at a concert in April. We had had a nice conversation about his having two musical parents and about what instruments he was interested in taking up. I encouraged him to become a musician because, as I told him, when you join a group such as a band, you join a family and you can belong to it your whole life. (How ironic: I did not realize that soon that would no longer be true for me.)

The next day I received a message from an old friend in the band, inquiring kindly how I was doing. This person expressed the opinion that the shouting reflected poorly on the band and that it must have been stressful for me. She asked me what the shouting was about, and I explained in a reply message. In a third message, she told me of others in the band who were also of the opinion that the shouting was embarrassing for the band. All this made me feel better.

I received another message the day after the concert, this time from the band director, Shaun. He said the following.

“I hope you are okay. I was unable to check on you in the chaos of breaking down the stage tonight before you left. I understand why you probably left as quickly as possible after the situation unfolded between you and the Lordo family tonight on stage. 

I was unsuccessful in my effort to mitigate or otherwise extinguish the flames of disagreement in the situation as it unfolded. I deeply regret that I could not help more to resolve this before it grew to become a clearly jolting experience for you and those of us on stage who witnessed it. 

I’m recommending that everyone involved in the situation that unfolded tonight document what happened to the very best of their recollection. I am doing so as well. 

The board will meet on Thursday night this week for their meeting, and this incident will likely be addressed. Dan is still the president of the band. The elected board members don’t begin their duties until after the first outdoor concert of the season, which is technically Memorial Day in our schedule, even if we have performed “indoor” works for the last two concerts at the Pavillion. 

I want you to be aware that board members will be addressing the matter exclusively. Neither Don Lordo (as a party to the incident) nor I (as a witness to the incident, and I’m not a member of the board anyway per the bylaws) will be involved in any of the board’s decision-making on this. This is exclusively being handled by the board per our understanding of their role in our organization.”

I thought that Shaun’s message was supportive and comforting towards me and did not appear to place blame on me at all. Shaun referred to Dan Young’s “still” being the president of the band because we had had elections just before the concert and we thus had a current board and a board-elect. Don Lordo – the man who shouted at me – was the president-elect. I noted particularly Shaun’s declaration that it was the board that was addressing the matter and that he himself was just a witness.

In response to Shaun’s message I sent a statement to Dan and the other board members recounting what I experienced at the concert and explaining why I had spoken to the children as I did. Here is what I said. (It does repeat my story of what happened that I related above, but the exact wording of my communication to the board may be important in interpreting subsequent events.)

“Shaun Salem told me that the band board is to be investigating the incident that occurred at the benefit for Ukrainians in Poland at Bissell Park and advised me to send you a memorandum documenting what occurred as I viewed it.

At the concert, during the couple of minutes that we were putting up our music for Songs of Grace and Glory (SGG) following Fanfare for the Common Man, I noticed that there were two children down on the grass near the stage, not near any adults, who were sort of wrestling with one another and chattering and calling loudly. This chattering continued as we began to play SGG.

Most of the flutes had many measures of rest for most of the beginning of the piece, so I could hear the kid noise very clearly. I considered standing up, taking a few steps toward them, and speaking to them, but I did not want to draw the audience’s attention during the piece. The noise continued throughout the piece and I could hear it much of the time even when I was playing myself. I concluded that the kids (1) would not be stopping any time soon and (2) since I could hear the noise, it could also be heard by the audience sitting near the kids. (The kids were sitting between the band and a chunk of the audience.) This noise was interfering with my playing and, I thought, probably also the nearby audience’s enjoyment of our music.

So after we finished with SGG, I stood up and walked a few steps toward the kids and I said the following: “Please stop chattering while we are playing. It’s distracting.” That is all. I did not use a loud or antagonistic tone. I did not think the kids took it to be hostile, although the sentiment was admonitory; the one I mainly saw, the boy, reacted with an expression of “Oh”, as thought he had not been aware previously that he and his sibling had been loud enough for people to notice. I rushed back to my seat immediately because Brent was announcing the moment of silence. So, I thought, problem solved because I did not hear them any more after that.

But then at the end of the concert, as I was packing up, a woman whom I did not recognize came up to me and started yelling at me in a loud voice. She told me I had no right to speak to her children and ordered me never to speak to her children again and to stay away from her children. I did not want to engage with her there on the stage. She kept yelling, saying that she was “a professional musician” and that her children were adopted and “had been through enough already”. She added that she would not be coming back to the band (I assumed she meant band concerts). As she moved around the back of my chair to leave, she kept on yelling and did not appear to hear me mutter, “It takes a village to raise a child”. When she finally left, I thought that that was the end of it.

As I continued to pack up my things, a man whom I recognized as Don Lordo suddenly came up to me aggressively, shouting as he approached, and ordered me not to speak to his children again. I think he also said something about upsetting his wife, but I could not be sure because I could not understand him very well – he was shouting so loudly that perhaps he was not enunciating very well. (I deduced at this point that the woman was Beth Lordo since Don Lordo clearly was her husband.) Shaun Salem moved in and persuaded Don Lordo to move away from me.

As I left, nobody in the band said anything to me about this incident; nobody asked me why the Lordos were yelling at me. I felt very alone in dealing with this. I was also bewildered, because my “offense”, if it could be considered an offense at all, seemed trivial compared to the response it elicited from the Lordos. Their reaction seems irrational to me. I have felt stunned and humiliated ever since this incident occurred and it is eating away at me.

I would like to make the following points. Ms. Lordo, when she came up to me, did not exchange any words with me that would have enraged her enough to respond with such anger – and at such a volume. On the contrary, she came out swinging, so to speak. She did not attempt to discuss anything at all, did not pause to let me reply to her, and did not ask what I was thinking or why I did what I did. Unlike the kids, her noise was conscious and deliberate and, it seemed to me, calculated to draw attention to herself and to me. Now, when anybody yells at anybody else, there is a tendency of bystanders to think that the yelled-at person must have done something to deserve the yelling. I fear that that is true in this case and that people will blame me for the disruption.

Mr. Lordo apparently took his cue from what Ms. Lordo said to him. He too did not ask me anything or seem to want any reply from me at all. Again, but even more since Mr. Lordo is a member of the band, I fear that people will think that it was my fault that he yelled at me.

Ms. Lordo’s assertions that she was a professional musician and that her kids were adopted and had suffered enough struck me as non sequiturs in the context of the event. Why was it relevant that she was a professional musician? Was she asserting that I was a lesser being because I am not a professional? Was she saying that if she could stand kid noise when she played, I should be able to? I would think that that would go the other way, that as a professional musician she would want her kids to behave at concerts and she would be correcting them if they weren’t. In this case, I would say, she should have been the one shushing them. As to her other assertion, I could not have known that they were adopted and had had hard lives, as any realistic person would realize. Still, how would that justify their making noise on and on?

I am not some old curmudgeon who hates kids. I submit the following examples. After the concert, I realized that I had had a nice little conversation with the Lordos’ boy at the Showcase Concert (where he and his sister behaved well). We talked about what instruments he was interested in playing and I encouraged him. I liked him. I did not recognize him at the benefit concert because I was wearing my band glasses, but even thinking he was a stranger I didn’t feel any animosity toward him for the noise. I have tutored many college and high school kids at Pellissippi State (my job for the past 12 years) and many high school and middle school kids privately, in addition to having something to do with special needs kids at my volunteer work during the last two years. Just this last week one autistic boy who doesn’t speak and who has not reacted to my presence much all school year came up to me and smiled and twined his fingers in mine. This was his way of saying that he liked me and we were friends. I have not seen him do this to anyone else, so it was very gratifying. In addition, I have raised two children myself. My conclusion from all my experience with kids is that if they make a lot of noise, it is usually not malicious (to disturb others on purpose), but just clueless. Thus if you “nudge” them to stop, they do, at least for a while until they forget. So I truly did think that a word to the wise to (as I now know) the Lordo kids would be helpful for me and the audience and for them.

I do believe that it takes a village to raise a child. In my young days, adults who were not relatives or teachers of kids often took it upon themselves to correct small instances of misbehavior by reproaching the kids and to correct significant instances of misbehavior by speaking to the parents or teachers of the kids. This was regarded as proper behavior because parents and teachers could not be everywhere. I think that this is still true today.

In conclusion, I think that the Lordos forgot where they were because they were too enraged to pay attention. But I did not forget where I was and what solemn activity we were engaged in; that is why I tried to quiet the children and why I refrained from engaging with the Lordos and defending myself. I hope that the board will pay particular attention to this point.”

I received a reply from ORCB President Dan Young inviting me to the board meeting at which the shouting incident was to be investigated. Here is what he said.

“Since we are in the process of transitioning to a new Board, I hope I have included all current and newly elected Board members. This meeting will be to review events surrounding the unfortunate ‘Scene’ that transpired at the most recent concert to benefit Ukrainian children, and which a number of members feel reflected poorly on the Band. Thank you in advance for your participation. Don and Beth Lordo have submitted written transcripts of the events. Don, as newly elected President of the Board, has chosen not to participate in this meeting. I have included Janet Westbrook on this meeting invitation and hope that she can be present. Thank you all.”

Subsequently, Dan sent me and the board members a message giving the agenda for the meeting, as follows.

AGENDA FOR MAY 12, 2022 BOARD MEETING

Opening Remarks – Dan Young                                            1 minute

Reading of Janet Westbrook’s testimony                               8 minutes

Addressing of Questions to Janet – Shaun Salem                 6 minutes

Time for Janet to make any statements or changes             3 minutes

Janet will be asked to exit the meeting

Shaun will address the board                                                  8 minutes

Board discussion and finalize deliberations for a vote          30 minutes

Board members vote                                                              2 minutes

Adjourn and move downstairs                                                2 minutes

                                                                                               60 minutes       

I was troubled by the fact that Shaun and not the board members would be asking me questions about what transpired at the concert. He had said that he was a witness and not a voting member of the board, so that seemed inconsistent with his being in the role of, apparently, a prosecutor. I showed the agenda to my husband, an organization-savvy veteran of the Department of Energy, and, unprompted by me, he pointed out the same thing. He warned me in a general way about what was going on with that, but I demurred; I didn’t think I was anything but a witness myself.

I attended the meeting, which was held on May 12, 2022. First, I was asked if I wanted to read my statement and I did; I had sent it to all the board members and I noticed that some seemed to be following along on their phones as I read it. I had to cut out two paragraphs (including the part about my not being a curmudgeon) because I was about to run out of my allotted 8 minutes. However, I did think I covered everything important.

Then Shaun began his questioning of me. He did not ask very many questions, but what there were almost all started out with “The Lordos’ statements say…..” This confused me, because it appeared that he was taking the Lordos’ statements as a baseline or assumed truth and I seemed to be expected to defend myself. He asked me if I had said, “Get over yourself, lady”; I readily admitted that I had, but added that I had left it out of my statement because since Mrs. Lordo was yelling at the time, she did not appear to have heard me and so I thought that my interjection was irrelevant.

He then asked me about two other things I was supposed to have said, but I do not believe I said. I don’t remember one of the two things he told me, but the other was that I replied “Good for them” to Mrs. Lordo when she told me her children were adopted and had had hard lives. I denied categorically that I had said either of those two things, in particular saying that I would never have said that about kids. Finally, he asked me If I had said, “It takes a village” and I agreed that I had said it. (It was in my statement, after all.) He also commented that Don Lordo said I acted “unprofessionally”; I don’t remember if I made any reply to that.

It did not occur to me later that although he was quoting from the Lordos’ statements, not all of what he said I was supposed to have said might have come from the Lordos; from later information, it appeared that statements were made by others, but the existence of any statements but the Lordos’ was not made known to me. Nobody else was quoted, even anonymously, to the best of my recollection.

I left the meeting after the questioning, as per the agenda. The meeting was taking place before rehearsal, so I went down to our rehearsal room. There was nobody else there at first, it being fairly early. I was very troubled by the tone of the meeting. So I played a couple of solo arrangements I kept in my folder, just to console myself. They were Allerseelen (by Richard Strauss) and Solveig’s Song (from Peer Gynt, by Edvard Grieg). These are not exactly happy pieces, but they matched my mood. A few people came in and I switched to playing some old marches from one of our march books; at one point someone was humming along with me. Finally, as more people arrived and it was almost time for Shaun to appear to tune up the band, I began to run though our pieces for the upcoming Memorial Day concert.

Just before the tuning was to start, Dan, the board president came up to me and asked if he could speak to me privately. He then told me that the board had voted to suspend me from the band for the summer. I was astonished because I had no idea that I was at risk of such a thing. I exclaimed, “Why?? It’s not fair!” Dan replied, “See, that’s why, because you won’t admit that what you did was wrong.” I tried to get him to specify just what I did and why it was wrong, but he would not address that. I asked him if Don Lordo had also been suspended from the band, but he would not tell me. Dan added pointedly that in the fall, the board was going to have a “code of conduct” that every member would have to agree to and sign.

In a state of shock, I began to pack up my stuff. The flutist who always sat beside me asked why I was leaving. I told her that I had been kicked out of the band. She seemed very surprised (she had not been at the Unity Concert) and she said she was sorry. I said bitterly that I could always write about on my blog. Others saw me get up and leave and I am sure that from my face they could see that I was very upset.

I drove home in a daze. It was probably not safe for me to be driving in that state, but I did not realize that when I drove out of the parking lot. I felt as if I had been stabbed in the heart. I did not understand what it was that I had done. Was it shushing the children? Was it being rude to Mrs. Lordo? I couldn’t imagine what I could have done to receive such an extreme punishment. When I got home, I told my husband what had happened and I admitted that his apprehensions about the prosecutorial nature of Shaun’s role were true.

I didn’t sleep well that night, or any night for days afterward. I spent every day miserable, obsessively mining my memory for clues as to how this catastrophe had come to pass. The band member who had sympathized with me earlier now sent me a message of support and asked me how I was doing. I replied:

“I am not doing well at all, being bewildered at why I am being punished. I feel poleaxed. I try to work Sudoku and I keep making stupid mistakes because I can’t focus; I have trouble finishing a crossword puzzle. I should be shopping for shoes, underwear, and yarn on the Internet but I cannot make decisions as to what to buy – I just keep clicking on the products I am interested in without ever choosing any. I usually make cookies when I host a meeting but yesterday, when I hosted a meeting of my cactus club, I got out the ingredients for brownies and just stood there. I finally got out a package of cookies that my husband had bought to take to my son and his family and put that out instead.

I had trouble getting the agenda together for my [club] meeting yesterday, but we stumbled through it. All of the people are my friends, so I told them about what happened at the concert. They were squarely on my side. Well, they heard only my side of the story. Still, two of them were musicians (a church choir and Choral Society singer and an organist) and had similar stories of being distracted by kid noise and movement while they were performing. The singer had even made a comment once to a third party, who repeated it to the parents, who complained to the minister, who smoothed things over by having the parties meet and talk – the way you would expect things to be handled in groups of people thrown together routinely over years. Another club member, an elementary school teacher with almost 40 years of experience, uncharacteristically complained of how some parents went overboard in defending their young. He is loved wherever he goes by young and old alike and is famously even-tempered, but he nevertheless had had his share of parental storms visited on him. I appreciated my friends’ “validating my reality”, but still, there was only limited comfort because there is nothing I can do to get back my band membership and even more, my reputation.

I am composing a final message to the board members to ask for some clarifications and I hope to understand things better if the board replies. But I do not think I will ever come back to the ORCB: how could I ever hold my head up there again after this? Band is spoiled for me now and I can never think of it in the same way. Almost 30 years of having a band home and now it is gone. It is just crushing me.”

As I mentioned to my friend, my pals in the cactus club were patient in supporting me and in comforting me later. One of them urged me to see a lawyer – my getting thrown out for shushing children is incomprehensible to her — but having been involved in several legal affairs, notably my whistleblower case, I am now allergic to lawsuits.

I also addressed people in my second band (which includes four people who are in both bands and who all played in the Unity Concert) and they were also supportive. Several people expressed contempt for the idea that one should not shush children and somebody muttered, “Little snowflakes”. One of them who played in the Unity Concert said that he had heard Don Lordo shouting, “Keep your hands off my babies!” Because Don had set out some electronics equipment, presumably for recording the concert, the player assumed that Don was referring to his electronics devices; he had no idea that Don was referring to actual children. I also received a message of support from a band board member who had voted not to suspend me and who was concerned for my subsequent welfare.

I had an insight about the claim that I had said “Good for them” when Mrs. Lordo yelled that here children were adopted and things had been hard for them. At the band board meeting I had denied saying that because I did not (and do not) believe that I said that. Several days after the meeting, I was reading an obituary in the newspaper, describing someone who had lived a productive and intereresting life and I exclaimed (to the dead person) “Good for you!” After my cactus club meeting a friend told me how he had dissuaded a person from buying a succulent to put in a light-inappropriate place that would condemn it to certain death and again I found myself exclaiming to him, “Good for you!”. It dawned on me that when I use “Good for you” or “Good for him (or them)”, it is always in a positive, affirmative way. I have used it several times since then, always without thinking before I did it, and it was in fact always in a positive context. When I want to say something sarcastic along those lines, I always say, “How nice for you” as Miss Manners taught us to do. The point here is that it is not credible, psychologically, that I would have said “Good for them” in response to Mrs. Lordo.

I prepared a final message for the board, asking them for clarification of why I was kicked out, as follows.

“As you know, I appeared before the Oak Ridge Community Band board on Thursday, May 12 to offer a statement as to what I experienced during and after the concert in Bissell Park on Saturday, May 7. In brief, my statement said that I shushed some children who had been making noise for some time; that a woman I now know to be Mrs. Lordo came up to me after the performance and yelled at me at length; and that Mr. Lordo came up to me a few minutes after she left and shouted at me until Shaun Salem led him away.

Following the band board meeting, while I was waiting for rehearsal to start, Dan Young told me that I was suspended from the Oak Ridge Community Band for the summer. I was astounded, having no idea whatsoever that my membership in the band was at risk in any way. I exclaimed to him, “Why? That’s not fair!” Dan replied, “See, that’s why” and added, “Because you don’t accept that what you did was wrong” (or words to that effect). I tried to get him to tell me more, but that seemed to be all he would say. When I further asked whether Don Lordo, as a member of the band, had been suspended as well, Dan was evasive and refused to answer. He also said that in the fall, the board would be producing a code of conduct statement that every band member would be required to sign in order to be allowed to play in the band; he gave no details about what that statement might contain or how it would be applicable to the incident at Bissell Park. I asked him when the suspension started and he replied that it was immediate. So I had to pack up my stuff and go, leaving everybody to stare at me and wonder why I was not staying for rehearsal.

All of this just dumbfounded me because I do not understand why I am being punished. I request that you provide me with clarification, as follows.

1)   In fairness, please provide me with a detailed statement as to what specific action(s) of mine occasioned the suspension. Was it shushing the children? Was it something I said to Mrs. Lordo? Was something else I am not aware of as an issue?

(Or didn’t say – remember I admitted that I said “Get over yourself” early in Mrs. Lordo’s tirade and “It takes a village, lady” near the end of it, but not anything else.)

2)   In fairness, please provide me with copies of the Lordos’ statements and also the statement of every other person who made a statement as a witness to the events.

I was not provided with a copy of their statements before or at the meeting and I was not told if anybody else had made a statement. The Lordos’ statements seemed to be the standard against which my statement was compared and the Lordos were not present at the meeting, so I wonder if their statements were taken at face value and not questioned at all.

3)   In fairness, please clarify the role of Shaun Salem at the meeting.

 The first indication I had of the band board meeting was when Shaun sent me an E-mail message saying that it would be taking place and asking me to submit a statement to Dan Young. He stated the following:

 “Neither Don Lordo (as a party to the incident) nor I (as a witness to the incident, and I’m not a member of the board anyway per the bylaws) will be involved in any of the board’s decision-making on this. This is exclusively being handled by the board per our understanding of their role in our organization.”

 Thus it startled me to read in a subsequent E-mail message from Dan Young that Shaun would be asking me questions, instead of a member of the board; my husband, looking at the meeting agenda, remarked that this seemed to put Shaun in the role of prosecutor. I think that his being the one to put questions to me was a conflict of interest, especially if Shaun himself came up with the questions and/or if he is considered to be a friend of Mr. Lordo.

4)   In fairness, please provide me with the minutes of the band board meeting so that I can understand the process that was followed.

5)   In fairness, please tell me what the band at large was told about the meeting: what causes were identified for the incident, what the board determined was an appropriate response, and what the sanctions were. If nothing was announced to the band as a whole, a member might ask why I was suspended; please tell me what the board or Shaun is going to tell him or her.

I am especially concerned about what the band was told, if anything, about my involvement and about the reason for my being suspended from band. As I am sure you can appreciate, I am concerned for my reputation and the possible imputation to me of things I didn’t say or do.

I would also like clarification of a few more things. First, Dan in essence said that it was my attitude that the board found exceptionable, i.e., not what I did but what I said about it later. I am troubled by the idea that it was my attitude toward what occurred, and not necessarily anything I actually did, that caused my banishment from the band.

Second, by his saying that I didn’t accept that what I did was wrong (whatever it was), Dan implied that I should have taken responsibility in some way. But I was not informed, by E-mail or at the meeting, that I was being blamed, nor was I presented with any bill of particulars as to the action(s) the board was blaming me for. No one ever counseled or advised me before the meeting about my belief that I was in the right. Nobody indicated to me that it was going to be “that kind” of meeting, i.e., one where for which one person was the defendant. So I think that my present bewilderment should be understandable. Also, I was not asked to give an apology at any time, so I can’t really be faulted for that. I must point out to you that trying and convicting people on charges that they aren’t informed about is a characteristic of secret tribunals. I find it hard to believe that secrecy was the board’s intent – perhaps the informational step was merely overlooked – but as you can see, the effect is that I did not have a fair shot at defending myself. But again, I did not think during the board meeting that that was what I was having to do – I thought I was participating only as a witness.

Finally, I am upset by the fact that I was kicked out of the band, which seems far out of proportion to anything I did. It seems to be a draconian punishment for whatever offense I committed. I am also upset that the Lordos as far as I know have not been sanctioned at all. It was they, after all, who created the disturbance by yelling. Surely my offense, if offense it was, was pretty trivial; surely their response was far out of proportion to what I did. So what the board is saying, in effect, is that creating a scene in a public place, by loudly and aggressively berating someone, is justifiable if you think you were provoked. I do not think that most people would agree with that proposition.

In conclusion, I have been in the Oak Ridge Community Band for almost 30 years; I would put my attendance record up against anyone’s. Yet this long history of being in the band and of the band counted for nothing, apparently. I will not be returning to the band even in the fall – how could I face people after this humiliation and how could I put myself at the mercy of band leaders whose judgment I have to question, including that of President-Elect Lordo? Band is spoiled for me now and I do not believe I would ever feel comfortable there again. It is just crushing me that I am losing my band home and family – and I don’t understand why. I think that Doc must be rolling in his grave.”

The reference to “Doc” at the end was to Steve “Doc” Combs, our late founding director. He was a genial man and gifted conductor, who raised the Oak Ridge Community Band to a high level of performance. In his band, everybody was welcome, the tone was very low key, and there did not seem to be any fights over turf or hissy fits. I respected him so much that I wrote a poem about him called “The Band Director” and read it at his retirement concert; I think he treasured it because his daughters told me at his funeral that he put it in his scrapbook. The incident at Bissell Park would never have occurred on his watch, for sure.

I hoped that this would elicit some more information about what the band board was thinking. It did not yield the return I had hoped for, but it did get a strong reaction from Dan and Shaun. Here is the reply from Dan, in which he washes his hands of the matter:

“I don’t intend to address the accusations in Janet’s letter. I am done with this issue. I completely agree with Police Chief Smith that no band member had any business admonishing children not to play, noisily or otherwise, in a public space. The inappropriateness of Janet’s behavior and her refusal to show any contrition for her behavior are astounding to me. I stand behind the way I conducted her dismissal from rehearsal and subsequent performances. I did not sign up to be Seargent-at-Arms, or Head Bouncer or any such nonsense. If she chooses to not come back, that is her decision. I feel the board showed leniency in suspending her from only the summer concert series.”

Although Dan spoke of me in the third person in this message and he was addressing Shaun and the band board, I was actually the addressee for this message and Shaun and the board were on the cc line. Dan‘s stating that my behavior was inappropriate and that the board showed leniency told me all I needed to know about his view of the whole matter. But he still did not identify just what behavior he meant: again, shushing the children? The way I spoke (or allegedly spoke) to Mrs. Lordo? Or something else?

Dan’s mention of Oak Ridge Police Chief Robin Smith was puzzling. How did he come into this? I wondered if perhaps Chief Smith was present at the concert, had come up to the stage when he heard the commotion, and then just weighed in or responded when someone (who?) asked his opinion. Or – alarming thought – did someone consult him later about the matter, in case there was some grounds for arresting somebody? I suppose I will never find out, but it was amazing to me that Chief Smith should have made the statement that, as Dan said, “no band member had any business admonishing children not to play, noisily or not”. If Chief Smith actually said that, what does that say about his judgment?

Dan’s obvious exasperation in having to deal with the incident any more was explained by Shaun’s message, given below.

“I write in response to you [Janet] in the interest of being transparent and forthcoming. There’s nothing to hide from here. New board members are now in office. They may have an official position to offer in response to you at a later date. 

This is my reply, not an “official” email the board is asking me to send, and if my reply doesn’t answer your questions on this matter, perhaps the newly elected board can do so for you at a later time. 

Let’s be clear that Dan has spoken for himself in reply to your email. Dan served for an additional week to oversee the investigation of the incident on stage in Don’s place. Don abstained from the meeting of his own accord, citing a professional obligation not to be involved in the decision of the board on this issue as a party to the incident.

Dan Young is no longer serving as president of the board. Don Lordo was reprimanded by Dan Young for his conduct on stage and it was documented accordingly. Don Lordo is now board president of the ORCB for as long as he is willing to serve this need.

You questioned my role in the board meeting.

My role as director was to investigate the incident on Saturday, May 7th, 2022, collect statements from the parties and witnesses of the incident, and to seek clarification of information by asking questions if needed. If that elevates my role to that of a prosecutor, then that characterization will have to suffice.

Your confidential statement to the board was reviewed by myself and every board member. These statements will remain confidential and will not be shared with anyone who doesn’t serve on the board. You will not have access to these statements, for confidentiality, unless you are elected to the board by the membership.

Don Lordo did not see your statement prior to your appearance at the board meeting. That was both his decision and ours as an organization to ensure as much impartiality as possible in the outcome of the decision. 

You were involved (as a party to the incident). You were not “a witness” to it. Please refer to my email to you where I clearly explained that to you:

“I’m recommending that everyone involved in the situation that unfolded tonight document what happened to the very best of their recollection.”

In your statement, you acknowledge your decision to approach children on stage and admonish them was your own, that you weren’t instructed to do so by anyone else. You acknowledge this action provoked the parents of these children to publicly confront you on stage after the concert. Whether you believe that it was an overreaction or not on their part was not for you to decide. That was for the board to consider in making a determination on a totality of the information available to them.

Upon gathering all statements, there were glaring discrepancies in your account of the incident and that of the Lordo’s [sic]. In questioning you about the discrepancies, you were given every opportunity to clarify them. No question asked of you led you to answer in any specific way. You were given the discrepancy between statements and offered the opportunity to respond, which you did.

One detail that was recognized as problematic in your statement concerns how you spoke to the children:

“I did not use a loud or antagonistic tone. I did not think the kids took it to be hostile, although the sentiment was admonitory; the one I mainly saw, the boy, reacted with an expression of “Oh”, as thought [sic] he had not been aware previously that he and his sibling had been loud enough for people to notice.”

Following the board meeting, I learned that one of our members witnessed how you spoke to the children and disputed your account. They were seated behind you on stage and witnessed your admonishment. You were not kind to the children you admonished on stage. These children were humiliated in front of a crowd of strangers they didn’t know by a member of our band and in full view of the public.

In concluding your statement to the board when Dan offered you more time, you said, “I wanted them (the children) to just shut up.” That was the last thing you said to the board before you left the meeting. 

What troubles me most of all in this investigation, that even upon reflection of the incident and your awareness that publicly admonishing children might lead some to blame you for the incident, you still consider that your behavior on stage was in keeping with the best practices of professional musicians. Your concern was that being yelled at would lead to blame, according to your account, not that publicly humiliating children from the stage would be a factor in the board’s decision. 

You had every opportunity to consider your own conduct on stage, you clearly considered the possibility your conduct might be questioned by the board, and you were given every opportunity to amend your statement before, during, and after questioning. 

No director or board member on Earth should be responsible for correcting you on how to conduct yourself professionally on stage. You’re the only person responsible for your decorum on stage, and you when you stood during our program to admonish children in the audience, you bear the full weight of that decision. Any child or audience member. It didn’t have to be the Lordo’s children for this consequence to be considered. 

It’s my understanding that this isn’t the first time you have been reprimanded for unprofessional conduct. Before I was ORCB Director, you stood on stage and told audience members to be quiet during a concert. I know about this from another director who was in the audience and was there to witness it, as well as members of our own band who confirmed that happened years before my tenure began. It should not surprise you to be suspended for this conduct on stage. You were reprimanded for it then. It was unprofessional then. It’s still unprofessional today. 

Upon concluding the investigation for the board, I made a recommendation to the board based on the information gathered in the investigation of the incident. After my recommendation was read to the board for the meeting, my role ended, and I was dismissed from the meeting by the board. 

As I told you in my email, I wouldn’t be involved in the finding of the board. After the board excused me, they deliberated for the remainder of the meeting, reviewed the totality of the statements given including statements of the parties AND the witnesses that were emailed to the band’s account and forwarded to Dan Young, and then reviewed my recommendation as director. 

Your suspension for the summer was chosen by the board members. My recommendation was for one full year. The board was more lenient, and I suspect the primary reason for that is your loyalty to the band. Honestly, your loyalty to the ORCB is why I recommended suspension for a year instead of making it permanent. 30 years of commitment kept future membership prospects on the table, if only for the sake of honoring Doc’s belief in you. 

Your dismissal from rehearsal last week was not announced to the membership before, during, or after rehearsal. Section leaders, board members, and I will be the ones who know. If word travels, it isn’t within my power to prevent it. Musicians in our area may ultimately know you’re not playing with us this summer, hopefully without knowing the reason why. That can’t be helped. We aren’t responsible for preventing rumors, but we’ll make a reasonable effort to prevent rumors within the organization whenever possible. 

I sympathize with your feeling of embarrassment. I don’t wish that on anyone, Janet. Actions have an unfortunate consequence of speaking louder than words. I hope you’ll consider actions in the future that speak louder than the actions you displayed on stage with us on Saturday, May 7th, 2022. Dan urged compassion throughout this meeting. I am being as compassionate as I can possibly be in replying to the email you sent to me and the board members you copied. It brings me no joy to write it, and I’m sure it brings you no joy to read it. 

The board’s suspension period ends after Labor Day. Whether you decide at that time to return or not, a code of ethics will be drafted as a result of this incident and will likely be in effect at that time. I encourage you to carefully consider the public humiliation our audience members and musicians will need to overcome before you ever share the stage with us again in the future. You can expect to be questioned about this incident again in the future should you decide to return. There is no water under the bridge on this issue. We will be vigilant in our efforts to promote a family-friendly experience for our members and community. “

I was stunned by the anger and hostility that Shaun showed in most of this message, so different from his first message to me after the Unity Concert. He said that he was not asked by the board to reply to my message requesting clarification, but in fact he was the only one who replied – not Dan, because he refused to address my message, and not any other member of the board. So in effect, Shaun made the official reply to my request.

In contrast to Shaun’s earlier message in which he said that the new board would take office after Memorial Day (May 30, 2022), he was now saying that Dan “served for an additional week” because Don Lordo had to recuse himself, a confusing discrepancy. Shaun said in his earlier message that the board was handling the matter, but then in this message he said that his role “as director” was to “investigate” the matter and turn over the results to the board. Why he was the one to “investigate” was unclear to me: I don’t think that that is in the band bylaws. So I don’t know if the board asked him to investigate or if he took it upon himself to do so. I do have a concern that Shaun and Don Lordo are friends (both percussionists who I think have played together in the past) and that thus it might be considered a conflict of interest for him to investigate an incident involving Don.

Shaun said that all statements would remain confidential and that I would never see them unless I became a member of the board. He added that Don did not see my statement prior to my appearance at the board meeting and that it was partly Don’s decision, but I was not afforded the opportunity to make that choice myself about seeing Don’s and his wife’s statements. Shaun said that the decision not to disclose statements was “ours as an organization” – but what organization, what is “ours”? If it was the band board, then why is Shaun saying “we”  since he said in his earlier statement that he is not a member of the board? Is this in the bylaws, or was it voted on as a decision by the whole board? This is unclear to me. In any case, I never received anything in writing from the band board that stated that I was being suspended and why and under what conditions I would be taken back in the fall; it was all oral.

Shaun rebuked me for describing myself as a witness to the incident, claiming that I was a party to it. I was supposed to have inferred that from his stating that I was “involved in the situation”. Well, from watching a lot of true and fictional crime programs, I have seen that to the police one is either a perp (actual or potential) or one is a witness, hence my confusion. Besides, I was not the one doing the yelling, which was what made it an “incident” (per Shaun) and a “scene” (per Dan).

Getting into the nitty-gritty, Shaun said that in my statement I acknowledged that my decision to approach “children on stage” and admonish them was my own; that is true (although I think “admonish” is too strong considering the words I did say, which included the word “please”).  But then Shaun said that I acknowledged that my speaking to the children “provoked the parents of these children to publicly confront you on stage after the concert”. I did not acknowledge that, in the sense that I believe that their reaction was hugely out of proportion to my speaking to the kids and so I did not “cause” them to make a scene. Shaun said that whether it was an overreaction was not for me to decide, but I think that it is a matter for everyone in the band, not just Shaun and the board, to consider; indeed, I hope that everyone who reads this will think about what Shaun is contending here. This is a matter of plain common sense regarding proper behavior in public.

Shaun said that “there were glaring discrepancies in [my] account of the incident and that of the Lordo’s” (sic) and that in his questioning me about the discrepancies I was given “every opportunity” to clarify them. Here he is implying, as he did during the meeting, that the Lordos’ statement was the truth and I had to defend myself with regard to any discrepancies, i.e. , I had to prove they were wrong and I was right without being able to see what they said.

Shaun said that following the meeting – not during the meeting and so inferentially not before the vote – that “one of our members” witnessed how you spoke to the children and disputed my account. Again, it is as though that person’s statement was taken as true and anything I said differently was false. But it is interesting that this is being adduced now as proof that I was “not kind”. I was in fact kind; nobody has suggested I used any words other than the ones I declared that I said, i.e., “Please stop chattering while we are playing. It’s distracting.” How are those words humiliating to children? How could I possibly have uttered them in a way that would have humiliated the children? In addition, I don’t have a loud voice (I am a small, 72-year-old woman) and I tried to pitch it so that it would carry only to the children and no farther. Since my back was to most of the band when I spoke and I had moved toward the edge of the band as well as the edge of the stage, I think that only 3-4 band members could have heard me and likely no audience members (since the latter were sitting several yards beyond the children). Nobody in the audience seemed to notice me, in fact; I could not see any crowd faces turned toward me as I spoke except for the kids’. So I do not believe that the children were “humiliated in front of a crowd of strangers”. This statement of Shaun’s was, I felt, not only unfair but untrue.

I don’t remember saying to the board as I left that I just wanted the children to shut up, but I don’t deny it. However, how was that insulting to the parents or children? It was simply a statement of how the children’s noise had gotten to me.

Shaun said that what troubled him most was that I was aware that “publicly admonishing children might lead some to blame you for the incident”; I did not think or say any such thing. What I thought was that people shouting at me – for whatever reason – might lead some to blame me, not my shushing the children. This is a fundamental misunderstanding by Shaun of what I said. Shaun makes it clear in this message that he did in fact blame me for provoking the shouting and that I was thus to blame for everything that occurred.

Also, I never said that my behavior “was in keeping with the best practices of professional musicians”. Whenever people use “professionalism” in speaking of amateur organizations, I inwardly roll my eyes: we aren’t professionals, people! We amateurs never committed to adopting the best practices of professional musicians, whatever those are; we simply strive to play well and make the audience happy. Is there some manual on that that we should have read? If opera star Jon Vickers and Broadway star Patti Lupone (and others we could cite) shushed people from stage, doesn’t the “best practices” contention go out the door? I have never heard – and I would bet that nearly all my fellow musicians have never heard – that it is not professional to shush people from the stage, when those people are making noise that disturbs the performer(s) and the audience. As my sister put it, some people treat a performance as background music for their personal conversations, as though it were a restaurant and not something that their fellow audience members paid to hear. So I would think that shushing often comes as a relief to performers and audience alike.

Shaun reproached me for being concerned that “being yelled at would lead to blame” rather than that “publicly humiliating children from the stage” would be considered by the board. As I thought I had made clear at the meeting, I did not humilate the children publicly. That point seems to be something that was brought up after I left the meeting, because nobody said or suggested during the questioning that I had humiliated the children; in fact, I think that perhaps this contention was thought up after the meeting because what the questioning during the meeting seemed to be about was merely shushing children, not the effect on the children. If the Lordos claimed that I had crushed their kids’s spirits, that was not stated.

In his message, Shaun said rather hyperbolically that “No director or board member on Earth should be responsible for correcting you on how to conduct yourself professionally on stage”. This is at odds with how he lectured me in his message about proper behavior and with how the band board tried to correct my behavior by kicking me out. And again, why was I expected to conduct myself “professionally” rather than just to conduct myself well in a general sense? Because Shaun contended that I was once reprimanded for unprofessional conduct (see below for my response to that), I will relate an instance of Shaun’s own conduct that was arguably unprofessional (and he is a professional).

This instance occurred a couple of years ago at the last rehearsal before a concert, while we were playing a medley piece that had a break between two of the songs in the medley. Shaun wanted to conduct the entry into the second song in a flashy way, with no prep beat to guide us in, but we kept missing it, time after time. Finally, I spoke up and made a suggestion on how to cue us for our entry. Someone in the sax section seconded me, saying “Janet has a point”.  For a moment, Shaun just stood there staring down at his score. Then all of a sudden he started to shout at me, something like this: “So you think you could do it better?” He stepped off the podium and faced me and said something like this: “You want to conduct?” His face was angry and so was his tone. The whole band was quiet. I just looked down at the floor and did not reply. After a moment he got back up and resumed the rehearsal – conducting the reentry the same way he did before.

After several more tries, we did get the entry right, but I think that that was because the people who were not getting it just dropped out until some time in the next full measure. At this rehearsal, there was a person who was not a band member but who was filling in on an instrument just for this concert as a favor to the band. She is a friend of mine and she told me later that when she saw how Shaun behaved, she nearly packed up her stuff and left. Others told me later that they were disturbed by Shaun’s petulant and unseemly outburst; as one person put it, I hadn’t said anything insulting and I was trying to help the situation. Shaun, of course, was not reprimanded for this and he never apologized to me for it. I would bet that nobody dared to bring it up with him.

In addition, a couple of weeks before the Unity Concert one large section was having trouble knowing where to come in, given that at the start of the piece Shaun was not directing the measures but allowing the solo player(s) to play the introductory measures at will. Shaun had told us that he would start beating time at such-and-such a measure, but still that section was having trouble settling on where to come in. Finally the leader of the section told Shaun firmly that what his section needed was Shaun’s directing every beat of every measure from the start. Now, this leader is a very senior member of the band (he was there when I started) and he is a highly educated and reserved person who never seems to complain. So I thought that on this rare occasion of his speaking up Shaun would take his comment very seriously. Shaun just stared down at his score, as he had when I made my comment a couple of years earlier, and then said stiffly that he would think about it. After we had worked on the piece a little while longer and were about to go to the next piece, Shaun said in a very deliberate manner, not looking at the section leader, that he was not going to direct every beat, but was going to start beating at the same measure he had been beating all along. I thought that this was a pointed rebuke of the leader.

At the next rehearsal I offered sympathy to the section leader, saying that I thought his suggestion, made in good faith and for the good of the performance,  was appropriate. He seemed surprised and a little bemused, but smiled in what I hoped was appreciation of my support.

I hope the reader will take these two incidents into consideration as I discuss the next part of Shaun’s message. He shocked me by saying that I was once reprimanded for unprofessional conduct, that I “stood on stage and told audience members to be quiet during a concert”. He said he heard about this from another director who was in the audience as well as from “members of our own band”. Shaun contended that it should not surprise me to be suspended for that same conduct now and said, “It was unprofessional then. It’s still unprofessional today.” Well, I absolutely do not remember any such thing. I have a vague memory of putting my fingers to my lips to quiet some noisy people, who I think did see me and did quiet down. But I do not believe that I received a reprimand for it – because reprimands sting and you never, ever forget them. So I believe that I would have remembered if anybody had reprimanded me for that. I think that the director referred to is our former conductor, Dale Pendley. With all due respect to Dale, I would not trust his memory on this. There is also the possibility that Shaun took what Dale said and made it into more than it was. Also, if Dale spoke to me and not to the band at large, why would any other “members of our own band” know about it and remember it? So this contention of Shaun’s seems very odd to me.

That said, I do remember receiving two reprimands during my time in the Oak Ridge Community Band. I will relate them below for the benefit of my readers’ understanding of how the band works, especially in what you might call the category of privileged characters.

The first time was during the tenure of Shaun’s predecessor, Dale; this was the only reprimand I remember during Dale’s time. This came from Dale himself and I believe that the band board was not involved. (I seem to recall that he handed it to me in writing, but I can’t find it in my files.) My beloved first husband Jim Stevenson was alive then; he was a music lover (played classical guitar and even listened to the opera on NPR) and he attended most of our concerts. After each concert, I would ask him what he liked and disliked. After one concert, he told me that he really liked Piece A but that on Piece B, the timpani was too loud over a long period and you couldn’t hear the other instruments. During the first rehearsal after the concert, when Dale and members of the band were offering comments about that performance (many of them from audience members), I repeated Jim’s comments, noting that they came from an audience member and were just being passed on by me. At the next rehearsal, I heard that the timpanist had quit the band in a huff because he felt that he had been defamed, musically speaking.

Now, I had known this man professionally for a long time; we were both in the radiation protection field. We were friendly and talked at meetings of our professional society. He was a famously tetchy person in that world, especially with regard to some software that his company had produced. I had had a conversation with him about that after the newspaper had interviewed both him and someone who disagreed with him about, I think, the practicality and efficacy of the software and he got very huffy about it. His anger was not directed at me, but I did see that he could get very defensive about things that he produced in the way of work. I had no idea that this extended to his timpani playing, however; in fact, when I passed along my husband’s comments, I did not even know which of our percussionists had played the timpani on that piece and so I was not criticizing any particular person. (In fact, part of the responsibility for setting the volume of play from moment to moment is the conductor’s, so Dale would have had to share the blame, except that the timpanist was also famous for not watching the conductor. Sometimes when Dale directed us to a stop, he would keep on playing, sometimes for two measures.)

The informant who told me that the timpanist had quit the band spoke of the timpanist scornfully as a thin-skinned diva and pointed out to me that I was only passing on audience comments, not offering them as my own opinion. Other members of the band said the same to me; nobody seemed to sympathize with the timpanist at all. So I was astounded a couple of rehearsals later when Dale came up to me and handed me a reprimand for criticizing a fellow member of the band. I defended myself to him, especially noting that I had not named names. But in his usual manner – avoiding confrontation – Dale just hemmed and hawed. I realized that the reprimand might have been the price Dale paid for getting the timpanist to come back to the band: a competent timpanist is hard to find and he didn’t want to lose the one he had, while I was just a dime-a-dozen flutist.

I thought about quitting the band myself, but then….no. Here’s what I did do. I liked the timpanist still and I didn’t want things to be weird between us in the future. I knew that he could not shrug off the perceived criticism of his performance the way most other people could. So I did not try any further to change Dale’s mind, but mended fences myself. After the timpanist came back to the band, I went up to him before rehearsal started and told him that I was sorry that my remark upset him. I did not say that my husband’s comment was wrong or that I was wrong to say it in front of everybody, but simply addressed myself to the right place: his hurt feelings. He was glad that I had approached him and we hugged. He also told me that my comment was not the only negative feedback he had received (about his performance or his work, I don’t know), so it seemed that my comment was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. His mother had also died very recently, so his nerves were on the ragged edge. He said that the one who really persuaded him to come back was a fellow percussionist, not so much Dale (but of course Dale’s appeal also counted). After that, things weren’t weird and he stayed with the band a long time. To me, he was worth my making the effort to appease him.

The other reprimand I received was during, I think, the first year that Shaun was our conductor. At one concert, we had just finished playing a piece with multiple solo passages, the most important being for a cornet. For some reason, Shaun himself (rather than an announcer) was naming the soloists and having them stand. But he forgot the cornet soloist, Noah Spitzer. He turned back to the band, so I knew he wasn’t going to mention Noah. Since I was sitting in the front row near him, I whispered something like “Don’t forget Noah”. He stood there staring in front of him and then just picked up his baton to signal that we were about to play the next piece. I offered sympathy to Noah after the concert for being overlooked, but like the good sport he is, Noah just shrugged.

At the next rehearsal, Dan Young (president of the band board) came up to me and told me that I was being reprimanded. He said that in speaking to Shaun, I had broken his concentration as he was focussing on the next piece. Consequently, I was to refrain from speaking to Shaun when he was at the podium during a concert. This was amazing to me: Doc and Dale would have welcomed somebody’s prompting them to recognize a soloist and in any case they never seemed annoyed if one or more of us spoke to them for any reason between pieces as they stood at the podium. So I thought that this was just Shaun getting back at me for, in effect, pointing out his error. As the reader may realize from the anecdotes I have related above, Shaun is very touchy about anything that seems to him to be criticism.

Now, getting back to Shaun’s clarification message, Shaun stated that he made a recommendation to the board: he wanted me to be kicked out for an entire year and in fact his recommendation would have been for forever had it not been for my almost 30 years in the band. He said he thought the band board had chosen a suspension of only the summer, instead of his recommended year, because of my long tenure. I was aghast that he would even consider recommending that I be permanently banned from the band – why on earth, I asked myself, would he even think that that was appropriate under the circumstances? I was upset that he invoked the memory of Doc (“honoring Doc’s belief in you”) – I don’t think that he knew Doc very well, if at all, and he surely could not have any idea what Doc thought about me. It was as though he was using the idea of Doc condescendingly.

Shaun reiterated that he was not involved in the board’s decision, but I thought that that was improbable given what I knew of the way he and the board had interacted in the past. For example, early on in Shaun’s tenure I complained to the board that Shaun’s unilateral decision to change the rehearsal period from 1.5 to 2 hours should have been voted on by the band. He had also changing the rehearsal night from Thursday to Friday one week so that he could play in another band’s concert – all of us shifting our schedules to accommodate his. The board not only upheld his authority to change all rehearsals at will (even), several of them sent him gushing messages of support, on which I was copied. We have all heard that a good district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich; I thought an analogous thing about Shaun and the board and I viewed them as basically a rubber stamp for his decisions. So it seems to me that in considering the Unity Concert incident they gave great weight to his comments about my lack of professionalism and about what constitutes professionalism; about the gravity of what I did and about the gravity of what the Lordos did; and about what the appropriate corrective measures would be.

Shaun said that my dismissal from rehearsal was not announced to the membership and that only Shaun, board members, and section leaders would be told. I did not understand why all the section leaders needed to know. If the dismissal was on a need-to-know basis, why would even my section leader need to know? All she would have to be told was that I had left the band for a while. Shaun said that if people knew I wasn’t playing in the band, they “hopefully” would not know the reason why. Of course, this indicates that he thought that I should be ashamed of what occurred.

Shaun then said that he sympathized with my feeling of embarrassment. I had not said that I was “embarrassed” by getting kicked out – on the contrary, I am mad as hell about it. To reiterate, I felt humiliated by getting shouted at by the Lordos and I was apprehensive that people would blame me for it. Shaun said that Dan urged compassion during the board meeting, but I did not hear Dan say anything that sounded compassionate. Nor was he nice to me when he came to tell me that I was suspended (he didn’t start out by saying, e.g., “Janet, I’m sorry to tell you this, but….”); he just seemed exasperated at my questioning the decision and of course he also showed his exasperation when he refused to respond to my message requesting clarification.

Shaun said that he himself was being “as compassionate as I can possibly be” in writing his response to my memo, but surely the sections where he castigates me harshly speak for themselves. Shaun said that it brought him no joy to write his message, but it smacked of letting off steam, which is cathartic….for him. He was right, however, that it brought me no joy to read it.

Shaun also said that a code of ethics would be drafted “as a result of this incident”. Dan had referred to it as a code of conduct that every member would have to sign. There is a difference between a code of conduct and a code of ethics and I think that it is significant that Shaun used the latter term. But in any case this requirement should give pause to the members of the band and to anybody contemplating joining the band. If it is vaguely worded, it could be used to justify any sanction on anybody; if it is too specific, it may leave no wiggle room at all for people like me who act in good faith but whose actions are interpreted in the worst possible light. In any case, I think that questions regarding whether the code is violated are for the band board to decide, not the director. It will be interesting to see who prepares the first draft of the code, Shaun or the board, and who is to make the determination as to whether the code is violated.

We arrive at Shaun’s final paragraph. When I read it, I was again amazed at how Shaun was blaming me for everything: humiliating children, provoking the parents into making a loud outcry, and bringing shame on the band. I.e., it was all my fault. This was couched in the most accusatory terms, such as saying the audience and the band members would have to overcome the “public humiliation” that I had caused before I would ever be taken back.

Then he said that I would be questioned about this incident again when and if I chose to come back to the band. (My husband’s impression of the last paragraph of Shaun’s message was that it was meant to intimidate me into choosing not to return.) That is, unlike prisoners who have served their time, I would be subjected to another interrogation about….what? I assume that I would be expected, after my punishment, to stop asserting my innocence and confess to my crime. “There is no water under the bridge”: there will be no forgiveness, no acceptance of a black sheep returning to the fold. Shaun implied that this has to be done in the name of vigilantly promoting a “family-friendly” experience for the audience and the band. It took my breath away that he would make my shushing of children a threat to a family-friendly experience.

In fact, it takes my breath away to think how Shaun blew this all up hyperbolically in order that, I guess, he could pin the whole incident on me. It will not be allowed to die, never; I  might as well sew that big scarlet letter A on my shirt right now. (That would be an A for Abuser, i.e., a child abuser.) I wonder if the band board as a whole is behind Shaun on this point; I would bet that most of them are unaware that Shaun proposes not to let me in unless I prostrate myself before Shaun and the board.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate the following points.

–     Nobody ever disputed that I said the words to the children that I claimed to have said; somebody told Shaun that I spoke “unkindly”, but there was no suggestion of any other words. Nobody ever disputed my story that the boy made an “Oh” expression, indicating his getting my message; nothing in the children’s reaction made me think that their feelings were hurt. So I absolutely do not believe that what I said was “humiliating” to the children or that they felt humiliated. They felt  reproved, maybe, but that is the nature of childhood: you are always being corrected because you are learning to behave. It truly does take a village to raise a child and someone’s gently shushing them should not be treated as a hanging offense.

–     I do not believe that my speaking to the children from the stage was “unprofessional”. But then, I never claimed that it was “professional”. All this professionalism stuff is a red herring that Shaun ginned up.

–     The disturbance was made by the Lordos, not by me. They chose to be loud in a public setting and they thus created the scene.

–     Shaun’s putting the entire blame on me for the incident is unreasonable. He also implied that the band board would be querying me again should I return to the band in the fall, but from the example of the band board meeting at which I was expelled, it seems likely that he would be the one interrogating me yet again and acting as the gatekeeper of my re-admission.

–     The board could have chosen to get me and the Lordos together and try to resolve issues. That is the way grownups do it, as in the example of my church choir friend and her fellow church members/parents. But the band board was following the lead recommended by Shaun.

–     It should be noted that the important communication to me from the band board was oral, not written, and that Shaun states that his last message to me was not the official word of the board. I should have received something in writing from the board, not Shaun, stating explicitly why I was being suspended. Also, declaring every statement to be confidential is not fair to the person being suspended; people are thus empowered to make any wild accusation they may choose to make and the accused person has no way of defending himself or of casting doubt on the motivations of the accusers. Since the band is a private organization, legal due process does not seem to apply to its actions, but since it is supposed to be an open, friendly organization, disciplinary actions should be more open and honest as well.

–     It should be asked whether the band board really wants to act as the thought police, inquiring into people’s motives or intent rather than considering their actions. That is where the code of conduct/ethics, coupled with an interrogation of people returning after suspensions, would lead. As I said above, it is not clear that this is the band board’s idea and not Shaun’s. Either way, it is bizarre.

I hope that the issues I have raised above will be given serious consideration by others who are part of a private organization founded on an inclusive, cooperative basis. These include personnel conflicts; what constitutes appropriate behavior for the members, band board, and director or organization president; and reconciliation versus corrective or punitive measures.

Shaun is a gifted conductor who could really lead the band to greatness if his ego doesn’t get in the way. To me, his message above has a bullying tone to it and the last paragraph especially shows his punitive and intolerant approach. He said that I “should have known” that what I did was wrong, that I “should have known” that I was a potential perp and not a witness, that I “should have known” to apologize at once, etc., but I knew no such things. Apparently it seemed obvious to him, but based on other people’s reactions, I don’t think it was obvious to others either. That indicates that his reaction is not what most people’s reaction would be.

I do not know why Shaun settled on me as the one responsible for the whole thing, or why he blew this affair up from a trivial offense on my part (if offense it was) to a heinous act of child abuse and labeled me a threat to the band’s family-friendly presentation. I have wondered if it was because somebody had to be blamed for embarrassing the band and if it wasn’t to be the Lordos, it had to be me. Thus my actions had to be viewed as beyond the pale so that my expulsion from the band could be justified. I have wondered if the Lordos threatened to sue and Shaun felt that by expelling me, they could have their face-saving pound of flesh, so to speak. I have wondered if Shaun, who at first seemed concerned about me, just decided that I had deviated too far from what he considered to be proper behavior and so he abandoned any consideration of giving me the benefit of the doubt. And on and on. I cannot draw any conclusion about the why from the facts I know at present.

So Shaun still gets to be band director, he still gets to enjoy the backing of the band board, and Don Lordo still gets to be band president – while I am out. Now, for me, Thursday night is just another night, or it will be in time. I will never get to play Night on Bald Mountain, Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral, The Commando March, or The Cowboys ever again. (My other band doesn’t play them because its selections are geared toward retirement home audiences.) I was supposed to have read my poem “Memorial Day” at the Memorial Day concert, but I didn’t get to do that, of course, and I never will get to again. I won’t be wearing the loose black pants I had recently ordered to wear at the summer concerts; I will just put them away in a drawer. I won’t be buying the expensive set of parts for Danzon No. 2 (that gorgeous piece by Arturo Marquez) that I had hoped we could play in the future. I have taken the Oak Ridge Community Band out of my will. I really miss seeing my band friends and I hope that if they know what happened to me they will not believe that I did wrong.

I must add that during the period when I was pursuing my whistleblower case in 2000-2002, the ORCB was a source of support second only to my husband, especially since my flute pal Rita Anderson was still alive then. When my first husband Jim died in 2006, my principal source of social support was the ORCB. I had not yet joined my second band at the time and I had been working from home for several years, so that I did not have a work group that I saw every day. Band became a focus for meaningful activity. When my job ended in 2007, I was really alone except for band and my cactus club, which met only once a month. I had an opportunity to take a one-year University of Tennessee certification course in criticality safety that might open up other jobs to me; I was all signed up and had paid my fees when at the last minute the course night was changed to Thursday night. I would have had to give up band for a year when my heart was still raw and bleeding. So I gave up my place in the certification program. That might have been a bad decision since I was never able to find a full-time job in my field again (due to the whistleblower prejudice, even though I had won the case). But I felt that band was more important to my mental health than the job was at that point. I have made many sacrifices to be in the band and it hurts to know that I was expelled for what seems to me to be no reason at all except pique.

I also hope that my fellow band members and people in other bands will be troubled by what Shaun and the board did and will worry about the precedent that it sets. My favorite story about Vladimir Lenin concerns a time following the Russian revolution when his faction was contending against a couple of other factions for control of Russia. One of his deputies argued that they needed to start a publicity campaign right away and try to win people’s hearts and minds to secure the dominance of their faction. Lenin said that that was not necessary; all they had to do was to shoot a couple of people in the other factions and “everyone will know what to think”. It seems that now, after my explusion from the band, everyone knows what to think….and who is really the boss of everything in the ORCB.

Shaun could snow most of the board with his high-minded blathering about professionalism, but I am too old a dog to be gaslighted like that. He characterized my actions as, in essence, morally wrong, but I don’t buy that either.  He tried very hard to make me feel guilty, but I don’t. Hurt, yes; humiliated, yes; but guilty, no.

And I still contend that I saved the moment of silence.